1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of communication networks, and more particularly to the design of optical bypass routing and switching in communication networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The increasing popularity of the Internet has increased traffic demands on the backbone networks supporting the Internet. The enormous growth of the data traffic on the backbone networks stresses the transmission bandwidth and burdens the processing capability of the electronic routers, switches, and multiplexers used in the backbone network. Optical technology has been seen as a promising solution to overcome this electronic bottleneck. For example, the use of Wavelength Division Multiplexing in optical fiber channels has the capability of increasing transmission rates to 100 Gigabits/second per wavelength. However, this increased transmission rate will burden the existing electronic routers and switches used in nodes of the network. Optical bypass has been considered as a method to offload traffic from the electronic routers. This is possible since it is not necessary for a node to process all the traffic that passes through it destined for other nodes. Although the emergence of optical bypass techniques appears to be a promising solution, there are challenges in incorporating these techniques in an IP network.